Quote

I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.

It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll have something substantial.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.